• DOI:10.1086/365183
• Corpus ID: 161310875

Notes on the Development of the Greek Alphabet

@article{Einarson1967NotesOT,
  title={Notes on the Development of the Greek Alphabet},
  author={Benedict Einarson},
  journal={Classical Philology},
  year={1967},
  volume={62},
  pages={1 - 24}
}

• B. Einarson
• Published 1 January 1967
• History
• Classical Philology

AT A time perhaps in the first half of the eighth century B.C.2 a Greek learned the shapes and names of the Phoenician characters in their traditional order and used this knowledge to write Greek. He knew little if any Phoenician, and his instruction had probably gone no further than was needful, consisting for the eye of a row of twenty-two written characters, for the ear of getting the series of twenty-two names by heart, and for eye and ear together of witnessing the spelling and writing of a single word, quite possibly the word *)ab, "father."3 He was apparently left to puzzle out the rest himself. Like all Phoenician words a second word would have contained a sign used with the value consonant + vowel, and this time the lucky accident might not have recurred, that he failed to hear or pronounce an unfamiliar consonant and thus reduced the value consonant + vowel to the vowel alone. Indeed the only consonants that he misheard or failed to pronounce were those indicated by *)alp, *he, and *cen; and evidence will appear (n. 3) that no Phoenician word spelled with *he or *cen was written out and read to him. The problem before him was to use the memorized series of what were to him nonsense words to determine the sounds written by means of the remaining characters. The informant had written the Phoenician character A, had pronounced :alp (its name) and 'a (its value in the word *)ab), and then done the same for the Phoenician B. He had then read the word: Dab. A (for the eye), 'alp 'a (for the ear); B (for the eye), b?t ba (for the ear); AB (for the eye), Dab (for the ear). Greek alph(a) may have got its ph from the phrase :alp 'a, falsely divided by the Greek as Dalp-a and heard as alph-a. For another explanation of the ph see note 5. The Phoenician names are inferred from the Hebrew4 and the Greek: